Godzilla updated

Rating: 6/10 (2 October 2013)

This movie had lots of promise and has some fantastic well done elements. The look of the movie is great as has been noted by just about everyone. However at the same time it feels derivative. Like a great master craftsman making the same artifact over and over, each one better than the last but ultimately all being the same thing. We've seen this movie before, just not as polished.
Idris Elba and Ron Perlman steal the show, their characters define the extremes of the human world better than any of the others and they chew scenery with the best of them. Elba especially managed to perfectly embody the anime archetype of the pained father figure general without making it ridiculous, I don't really know how he managed to do it even though I watched it happen. Perlman was just fun in every scene but his scenes worked best when his insecurity was on display rather than the Hellboy persona he channeled for other parts.
The two scientist dweeb types while fun and entertaining still feel shoehorned in for stereotype. The main leads are frankly forgettable cookie cutter jock types that seem better suited to TV sitcoms or police procedural. The "wacky" secondary characters such as the other crew or mission ops guy we never really see enough of to care about.
Plot? Well, not much of that going on here. Pretty standard alien invasion/giant monster fare with the we've-seen-it-a-million-times lone wolf character coming back for redemption. This is basically a good Godzilla movie wrapped in a live action Anime design.
Still, as popcorn munching fun it was pretty good. If it were any other director/writer I'd give it a higher rating purely for glitzy cartoon style entertainment but I expected a little something deeper and cerebral, if only in passing, since Guillermo Del Toro was the creative driver. The theme of merging neural pathways of 2 or more people to drive a giant robot has rich possibilities but the movie never mines this idea beyond the surface.
If they managed to make a sequel I'd go watch it but I'd temper my expectations.
One good thing after watching this movie, I'm not as bummed as I was before that Del Toro doesn't get to make Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness.
In the credits James Cameron is thanked (among others) and I think that can clue you into what this movie is, grand spectacle extremely well crafted but very linear predictable story.
The movie is dedicated to Ray Harryhausen and Ishirō Honda which is another clue what this film is, a love letter to giant monster movies, and frankly that works for me.
Recommended with some flaws.